Update: Please note that our main class is now held at Endon Village Hall as of March 2015. Details can be found in the announcement here and on the public classes page here.

Last night I had the pleasure of being invited down to Endon Scout Group’s headquarters where I gave a two-hour introductory seminar on staying safe at night for children. This is more a reference for anyone who attended than anything else, but it may be interesting for parents wondering what their son or daughter did on Friday too.

First off, I just want to thank everyone involved for the warm welcome and excellent atmosphere throughout. The kids, parents and staff that I spoke to were excellent and made us feel very welcome. The whole evening was an absolute pleasure!

We started off with a quick run through basic ideas of respect, honesty and awareness. Here’s a few points for your reference:

Respect: All CSPS sessions are based on a system of constant and mutual respect between all present. It’s not ‘teacher and student’, and not ‘adult and some kids’ but a group of people training together. Respect is earned, but we all deserve it the same as everyone else.

Honesty: Honesty with yourself is vital. If you don’t know why you’re training something, or can’t work out whether it’s going to work or not, then you have to be honest with yourself and accept that you don’t know! Then you need to be honest with your instructor and ask your questions! Honesty with yourself also means accepting your limitations as well as your strengths, and examining your attitude and mindset too. Honesty with your parents is also vital! If anything happens – whether it’s a small incident of bullying at school, a big incident of bullying at school, or an adult who tried to take you somewhere, or anything else that you didn’t like, you must be completely honest with your parents/guardians about what happened, in as much detail as you can manage! If the police are involved, no matter what happened again you must remain completely honest in every detail!

Awareness: Here’s the colour-code system that we played with last night:

White: Unaware. Able to be bashed without seeing it coming. Don’t be in this state unless you’re asleep!Yellow: Threat awareness. Looking around, listening, etc. Not paranoid or scared – relaxed, but observing everything. Ready. Be in this all the time.Orange: Threat evaluation. You see something you’re not happy about – whatever it is, and whether or not you know why you’re unhappy about it – and you start evaluating and thinking about what to do. You may cross the street, go the other way, find a safer route, etc. Still calm.Red: Threat avoidance. You may need to run or hide. You may need to de-escalate by talking someone out of their anger, etc. You may even need to pre-emptively strike or similar in order to make your escape opportunity.Black: Survival. This may be running, or hiding again, or it may be fighting tooth and nail to survive. A bad situation you really need to escape from ASAP.

This system isn’t mine – it was made by a man called Jeff Cooper, who I’ve never spoken to but I’ve heard many good things about. I’d recommend researching him if you’re interested. This is just my take on the concept, and may differ from some other people’s.

After that we got into the physical combatives focussed around striking and getting out of grabs predominantly. Then we drilled running away from someone insisting that we show them to a place. If you take nothing else away from our brief little session, remember this:

YOU SHOULD NEVER ALLOW ANYONE TO TRY AND TAKE YOU ANYWHERE. Your social awkwardness around saying ‘no’, not holding someone’s hand or running away without being physically attacked MUST BE IGNORED! I cannot stress this strongly enough. Social awkwardness will not save you! Leave it for social situations. Someone trying to commit a crime on you is not a social situation (depending on how we’re using the term), and as such the rules of social interaction such as awkwardness in particular do not apply!

Then we had question time, which seemed to be preoccupied mostly with what to do if you end up killing somebody! Funny as it may be to be asked that a few different times in a few different ways (especially the acid bath question made me laugh! Ahh, dark humour…), it’s a perfectly valid and important question. To simplify, I refer you back to the previous stuff about honesty. When telling your parents and the police in that situation what has happened, honesty is what you need.

What I will do for you when I get the chance is ask a police officer I know what exactly should be your considerations in a situation like that. Until then, I recommend a book called ‘Understanding Reasonable Force’ by Mark Dawes. Full details of the book, with review and room for discussion can be found on the CSPS forum –> Resources –> Literature at http://cspsonline.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=literature&action=display&thread=144 and you can get it easily on eBay or Amazon. Another recommendation I have on the legal side of things is to simply call the police on the non-emergency number (101) and ask! If there’s anyone who can give you advice on these things, it’s them. I’m a self-protection instructor, but not a police officer and not a legal advisor, so I really do encourage you to make your own enquiries.

Any questions, comments, etc are welcome and you all have my contact details. Thanks for an awesome night and I hope to see you again soon!

Please note: This article is now outdated. It is merely retained here for archive purposes, so the changing nature of things here can be seen by all. Consider the following just my older thoughts on the matter, from which the current ones have come.

In discussions of different training systems, it becomes immediately apparent after a quick Google or a sift through YouTube that the terms used in the title of this article are used more or less interchangeably by a great many people. This may seem unimportant, but it is becoming a big issue in the martial arts community today. In an attempt to help with this problem, and also to clarify my use of these terms online and offline, I thought it would be useful to produce a short list of these terms, and how I would define them, with some examples of common traits. Note that the following is merely my personal use of these terms, and other peoples’ usage of them will vary, as they are of course completely free to do so.

Martial Art: A martial art is exactly what the name suggests – an art. An art is a method of expression through application of creativity, and is typically concerned with aesthetics. As such, martial arts are often concerned with aesthetics, historical traditions, cultural customs and philosophy. These systems will often focus most of their training on one aspect of fighting, though not always. Martial arts can be traditional or modern, and different systems are often mixed into hybrid systems, usually in order to address what the instructors feel is a shortcoming of their original system. These are often termed Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), though this term is now used more for combat sports systems so many adopt the alternative term Hybrid Martial Arts (HMA) to avoid confusion. Martial arts can be thought of as a method of self-perfection rather than necessarily self-protection, though of course all martial arts training will have some real combative merit, and will often be extremely potent systems with which to protect oneself, so they should be respected as such.

Combat Sport: A combat sport is, again, exactly what the name suggests. If a system focuses on competition then it is a combat sport. These systems are often characterised by points-based sparring, where points may be awarded according to damage dealt, submission, knockout, etc or on aesthetic grounds, for example. Tournaments are often held on a regular basis, and the more well-known ones are the ones you see on TV and online. If training is focussed solely on fitness with any combative merits being considered secondary then that system could also be considered a combat sport.

Self-Defence: Self-Defence is where this topic gets confused on a regular basis, and arguably where it matters a little more pressingly. Self-Defence is a term used for reactive systems that are geared towards dealing with a combative situation by reacting to a physical attack. This includes Reality-Based Self-Defence (RBSD) systems. These systems are not concerned with aesthetics, historical traditions, cultural customs or philosophy.

Self-Protection: Self-Protection is a term used for systems that, in addition to the reactive methods of Self-Defence, incorporate proactive methods such as pre-emptive striking, and a great emphasis on awareness, evaluation, avoidance, evasion and communicative, noncombative strategies such as verbal de-escalation. An understanding of psychology thus often features prominently. As a result, self-protection systems are concerned heavily with how to stop a situation from becoming physically combative in the first place so that in a sense the physical combatives are secondary in focus. However, these physical combatives will often take up a large portion of the training time in sessions. These systems are also not concerned with aesthetics, historical traditions, cultural customs or philosophy.

So why does it matter? It matters because any confusion between these terms can lead to extreme differences of expectation and reality in training. For example, a traditional martial arts class marketing themselves as a combat sport might not be delivering what the students who have seen their posters are looking for, if they rarely hold tournaments or are not very competitive in their training. Similarly, a combat sport class focussed on UFC-style cagefighting could accidentally mislead prospective students by marketing themselves as a martial arts class, as people seeking a martial arts class may be looking for the tradition, philosophy and artistic values that a sports-based class would simply not be concerned with. This becomes more concerning when martial arts are marketed as self-defence or self-protection, however, as confidence in a martial arts technique trained from a perspective which is concerned with aesthetics can often be extremely dangerous in a real combative situation, or even fatal.

This article is not a criticism of any system, style, art or form, but rather a comment on the terminology used to denote them, and an appreciation of the effects that the confusion of these terms can have. Remember though: don’t judge a class necessarily by what it categorises itself as, because at the moment there is almost an interchangeability in many of these terms. Now that these terms have been clarified however, at least if nothing more our ESP-related discourse will be clear and unambiguous.